Crash Probe Focuses On Sabotage * Early Intelligence Suggests A Bomb May Have Brought Down Twa Flight 800.

July 20, 1996|By DAVID MARANISS, The Washington Post

The investigation of ill-fated TWA Flight 800 concentrated on possible acts of sabotage yesterday, especially still-inconclusive evidence suggesting that a bomb might have been aboard the plane.

Federal officials worked their way through a long list of theories, including the possibility, still not dismissed, that the crash was caused by a mechanical malfunction. But they all but ruled out the notion that the plane was brought down by a missile and downplayed previous reports of groups claiming responsibility.

Officials leading the massive investigation have still not concluded definitively that the explosion that brought the jumbo jetliner out of the sky Wednesday night -- killing all 230 people aboard the New York-to-Paris flight -- was an act of sabotage. But much of the work yesterday among intelligence experts in Washington and near the crash site in the Atlantic 60 miles east of New York City focused on the notion that this was a terrorist act.

"We're looking at this as a criminal investigation," said Jim Kallstrom, director of the FBI joint antiterrorism task force probing the crash.

According to sources close to the investigation, some members of the probe team were especially struck by evidence that some of the bodies of victims showed burns in their lower extremities. This might have suggested that a bomb exploded low in the fuselage, perhaps the cargo hold, these sources said. But there was some dispute about where and how badly the bodies were burned, with a Suffolk county medical examiner saying he viewed no severe burns on the bodies he studied.

In addition, some of the metal remains of the plane that were recovered are twisted outward, which suggests an explosion or a bomb, a senior law enforcement official said. But like so many bits of evidence, this information by itself is not conclusive, the source said, because some of the metal could have been twisted in this fashion as the plane began to break apart.

In Washington, U.S. intelligence officials reported that a preliminary check of the names of passengers aboard the flight on its first leg, from Athens to New York and then the doomed flight to Paris turned up no evidence that anyone suspicious was aboard. That conclusion was drawn in part from a comparison of the manifest with a classified databank maintained by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research containing more than 30,000 names of known or suspected terrorist and felons. But a senior law enforcement official said that background checks of the passengers also are being conducted to ensure there "were no phantom passengers" with fake identities.

Officials said the CIA had reached out to several intelligence agencies in friendly countries, seeking any shred of evidence pointing to potential involvement by a foreign group. One point of intense interest to them is Athens, a launching point for terrorist attacks in the past, whose airport as recently as April was judged by U.S. officials to have inadequate security safeguards. In May, U.S. officials certified that the airport had made improvements in its security, but some questions about safety there linger, and U.S. intelligence officials are trying to find out more about security procedures prior to the Wednesday departure of the TWA aircraft.

U.S. officials said they had investigated but ultimately dismissed a report that a Lebanese man involved in financing Hezbollah, a Middle East group linked to past terrorist acts, had attempted to board the TWA airplane on its Athens-to-New York trip with a U.S. visa he obtained from the U.S. embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The man's presence at the airport had aroused interest because his name appeared on a "watch list" maintained by the State Department of persons considered undesirable for entrance into the United States. He was added to the list after he had obtained the visa.

But he was not listed on the passenger manifest for the TWA flight, and U.S. officials now believe he intended to fly from Athens to Beirut, according to several knowledgeable officials. They said he arrived at the airport after the TWA flight departed, and his presence at the airport that day is now judged coincidental.

The incident still has some mystery attached to it, however, because officials said they could not provide an explanation for why -- if the man was not destined for the United States --his presence at the airport was noted and he was detained by Athens airport authorities until a U.S. consular official could reach the airport to retrieve the visa.

Kallstrom of the FBI task force said he was not ready to take the leading role in the investigation away from the National Transportation Safety Board, which has been operating in tandem with his operation, but he talked as though such a transfer might be imminent.